"You can't fix it. You can't make it go away.
I don't know what you're going to do about it,
But I know what I'm going to do about it. I'm just
going to walk away from it. Maybe
A small part of it will die if I'm not around
feeding it anymore."
--Lew Welch

How to tell a story

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Patterson's BookShots

"And now the author of popular thrillers — and children’s books and young adult novels and romances and mysteries — has launched BookShots , a series of short, cheap, plot-propelled novels directed at an audience more prone to reading smartphones than print. (Naturally , there is an app for it.)

“In this day and age, when so many people have decided to spend so much of their lives not reading books, I think to create a new habit for them is a smart thing,” says Patterson, 69, perched in the summer study of his Hudson Valley home, the room dominated by a sleigh bed where he reads and edits.

The trick? “I’ve taken the fat out of commercial novels,” he says. “In an awful lot of novels, there’s more in them than there should be.”

Not in these books. The sentences are simple and declarative.

And frequently double as paragraphs."

##

I had similar idea several years ago, of course, novellas based on the screenplay. See CineFiction. He's rich and famous. I'm not.

Earlier blog (archived)

ENTERTAINMENTS

Career Support

"Charles' impact on Northwest literature and theater over the past twenty-plus years is impressive. As a critic I've followed his work since the early 1980s, and no playwright has had such an important or long-lasting effect on this community's cultural life." --Bob Hicks, Senior Critic (retired), The Oregonian

"During the years we've worked together, I feel Charles was the clearest and most important theatre voice in Oregon." --Steve Smith, Artistic Director (retired), Theatre Workshop

"This play has balls!" -- Anonymous young man, shouting in the dark before curtain call for Country Northwestern.

2006
Finalist, Mystery of the Year (Foreword Magazine), for Dead Body In A Small Room.

2007
Begin making digital films. Deconstructing Sally, perhaps the best of the bunch ("Deconstructing Sally has voice: It’s a good example of how skillful and individualistic democratic filmmaking can be.")

2008Changing Key, a video hyperdrama and lecture-demonstration presented to national hypertext conference.